


Nautilus

by sea_level



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 00:20:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16862716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sea_level/pseuds/sea_level
Summary: Newt and a snapshot on the road to recovery.





	Nautilus

Newt turns the Nautilus shell over in his hands. Once. Twice. The fine details, the repeating lines, the perfect, mathematical growth. Hermann would love it, though for entirely different reasons than Newt. He closes his hand around it, feeling the edges pushing into his skin. It's grounding.

They've granted him a room now, but the doors are locked, and there are no windows 20 feet underground. He has a bed, a toilet, and two entire tables. One for his studies and one for eating at. Both surfaces are covered in books and loose-leaf paper.

It's a prison. It's supposed to be a recovery room, somewhere safe he can be until the voices and the chittering fade away and his connection to the precursors is finally severed. Part of him refuses to let go of the idea that the precursors have hollowed out their own little home up there in his head, something permanent. It's a thought that's he's been working hard to shake, but it's persuasive, a constant presence in the back of his mind.

Hermann will drop by later, with a sad smile on his face and a helmet under his arm. He'll fit the helmet on Newt's head and it'll work its magic, helping his brain to isolate itself, to help it fight back. Then, Newt will develop a splitting headache which won't leave for the rest of the day, and the military man outside the door will point a gun at Newt until Hermann leaves.

Hermann is too valuable. Too full of precious, classified information to be allowed around _him_ for longer than strictly necessary.

Hermann had fought it at first, but Newt had been the one to push him away. He didn't want want Hermann to have to look down the barrel of a gun ever again, especially not when he'd been behind the last one.

Newt sets the shell down on the table and turns bleary eyes on study upon study upon study. He's read each of them hundreds of times now, but it's all speculation. None of these people have ever drifted with a Kaiju brain. All they can do is guess and extrapolate based on what precious little data they've been able to salvage in the years since.

The closest thing he has to a Bible is a small, black book, filled from front to back with nigh intelligible scribbles. Hermann's notes on his treatment, based on hundreds of Newt's own brain scans, over a year's worth of experiments and failed cures, and Hermann's own experience as the only other person to ever drift with a Kaiju. It's written fervently, despair and hope alike bleeding from the ink. It's tangible evidence that there's still something between them, even after all these years apart and everything that Newt has done.

Hermann had given it to him after they'd finally found something that worked. Not a cure, but a process to help expedite the natural rejection of another's mind. Hermann had been joyful then, sunlight through stormy clouds. He was sure of it, Newt would be free by the end of the year. Newt had known Hermann too long by now to question it, and for the first time in years, something bright seeped into the cracks in his heart.

Then, Hermann had stood, reached into his pocket, and withdrew the book. He pressed it into Newt's hands with little fanfare and some passing remark about a lack of reading material, and then he was gone.

Newt cried that night, but he made sure a single tear never touched the book. Partway through, one of the guards actually brought in a tissue box. He'd set the book carefully down and laughed through the mucus. Newt had forgotten what it was like to be loved.

A Nautilus shell. A book. Four claustrophobic, concrete walls. His world condensed down to a ten by twelve foot room, but it's here and not out there with infinite space and resources that he finally does feel a bit more free.

Hermann knocks on the door and Newt feels something tightly wound inside of him begin to unravel.

**Author's Note:**

> Tired but unable to sleep, I grabbed my phone and wrote this in homage to the fix it idea I had that I'll never write. The premise is vaguely similar to some of my early ideas but I didn't really want to get into the whole fake Newton's death + biomechanical brain thing I had going on but listen it would have been beautiful.


End file.
